Red Sox explain reasons for trade

Saturday

Aug 25, 2012 at 6:43 PM

BOSTON -- The deal is complete.

Tim Britton

BOSTON -- The deal is complete.

On Saturday, the Red Sox officially announced they had traded Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto to the Dodgers for James Loney, minor-leaguers Ivan De Jesus and Allen Webster and two players to be named later -- believed to be Jerry Sands and Rubby De La Rosa.

Even a day after it was all but done, it's a stunning development -- a drastic change in course for the entire franchise that took a trade unprecedented in baseball history.

Why did the Red Sox do it?

General manager Ben Cherington and manager Bobby Valentine went about saying it in different ways, but the ultimate message was clear on Saturday: Something needed to change.

"I think we recognize that we are not who we want to be right now," said Cherington. "And it's been a large enough sample performance going back to last year that we felt like in order to be the team that we want to be on the field, we needed to make more than cosmetic changes. So as we look forward to this offseason, we felt like the opportunity to build the team that we need, that the fans deserve, that we want, required more of a bold move to give us an opportunity to really re-shape the roster, reshape the team."

When asked about change, Valentine was, somehow, direct and vague at the same time.

Was change necessary?

"Yes."

In what sense?

"That it was necessary."

Why?

"It just didn't seem like it mixed as well as it should."

Specific to the quartet traded?

"No. It has nothing to do with the individuals who were in the trade."

Is more change necessary?

"I don't know that. I haven't even evaluated this change."

Was that need present even before you were manager?

"I think so. I don't know."

Cherington said it was more about on-field performance than anything else.

"The bottom line is that we haven't won enough games. That goes back to last September," he said. "This is not about the four players we gave up, anything they did particularly wrong. We just haven't performed as a team when we needed to. As we looked at, we felt that in order to get to a team that we believe in, a team that our fans deserve, a team that is a winner and sustains winning year after year, it was going to take more than cosmetic changes. It was going to take something more bold.

"The great thing about this game is you have a sort of tangible answer every night of how good you are, and this year we've been not good enough on too many nights. It starts there and that part is pretty easy. What leads to that, trying to figure out what causes that, yeah, that can be more difficult. Part of it's the player personnel, the roster; part of it's other things. We need to examine all of it."

For now, things look very different in the Red Sox clubhouse.

"It's a little different not having those guys here. It's been a struggle for the most part of this season anyway," said Clay Buchholz. "This organization is trying to take a step, make a couple changes that they think need to be made. That was the starting point."

"You're used to seeing these guys faces throughout the year and all of a sudden they're gone. It kind of gives you a weird feeling but you get over it, we have a game tonight we have to worry about," Cody Ross said.